Coincidences
by E. Limberg
Summary: Post Veritas. Kate's experience with Bracken's men in the hotel room reminds her of an incident over ten years ago. She doesn't believe in coincidences. Castle tries to convince her that it means nothing and is in fact a coincidence.


**Coincidences**

Kate collapses on the couch after they make it back to the loft. Castle had insisted that they stop at the hospital after visiting her father; he had tried to clean her head wound at a rest stop, but she was still unconscious and he was not very successful. The doctors in the ER said she had a mild concussion and had cleaned the glass out of the wound, the cuts not requiring any stitches.

Castle sits down next to her. "You okay?"

"I will be," she gives him a weak smile.

"Do you… want to talk about it?"

"I… Castle, what happened in the hotel is not your fault."

"I shouldn't have left you, Kate. I should have waited for you, and then we could have gone to get a car from my guy together," he takes her hand in his, squeezing it gently.

"No. Rick, if you had been there, Bracken wouldn't have hesitated. He would have killed you right then, and… if you had died, I wouldn't have fought them off. I would have let them kill me too," she admits, looking down at the floor.

"What happened while I was gone?" She hadn't gone in too much detail at the hospital and had ghosted over that part of the story when they were telling her father. He isn't sure that he really wants to know, but he is hoping that his writer's imagination is conjuring stories that are worse than what actually happened to her.

Kate draws her knees up to her chest and wraps her arm around her legs, keeping her other hands in Castle's. "I heard a noise out in the bedroom, and I thought it was you, that you had changed your mind or forgotten something. I - I grabbed the scissors because there were so many people after us and that was all I had to protect myself. Bracken was standing in the middle of the bedroom."

"Bracken was there? How? What did he say?"

"He told me it was useless, that I should have just given up so that he wouldn't have to kill me, so he could be president. I told him that there was no way he was going to be able to make it through all of the interrogations, the questioning, to become president. I asked him to kill me, said that after all of this time he should be the one to pull the trigger. It was… I figured if I was going to die anyway, I might as well try to get some evidence so that he could finally be brought to justice. He knew what I was trying to do, and left it to the two guys he had brought with him."

"Kate… you don't have to tell me if you don't want to."

She rests her head gently on his shoulder, "I know you, Castle. You may say that you don't want to know, but inside you're too curious. If I don't tell you, you'll just bother me about it until I do."

"You know me too well," he kisses the top of her head, careful to avoid the cuts.

"Anyway, one of Bracken's guys took this pill out of his pocket, and I punched him before he could force me to take it. The other guy grabbed me from behind and forced my mouth open so he could get me to take the pill. They shoved me down into this chair and pulled out a bottle of whiskey. They kept forcing me to drink it; I think they poured almost three-fourths of the bottle into my mouth, and there was nothing I could do but swallow it. That much alcohol in less than fifteen minutes made me more than a little tipsy. So they got my gun off the dresser and started to position it in my hand so that it would look like I committed suicide. I knew there was no way I could let you come back and find me like that, Rick. So just before he pulled the trigger, I turned the gun and shot the guy behind me. The guy that had been pouring me the whiskey struggled a little, but eventually I shot him too. I didn't take that pill, Castle; I kept it in my cheek and spit it out as soon as they were both down."

"So what happened to your head?"

"The first guy I shot wasn't dead. He came up behind me and hit me over the head with the whiskey bottle. I shot him three more times after that. I knew I had to get out of there before someone came to investigate. I was walking down the hallway when I passed out. I remember hearing your voice, and then… when I woke up we were in the car."

"Kate, I'm so sorry. I should -"

"No, Castle. Don't beat yourself up over this," Kate interrupts. "He would have killed you. He would have made it look like I killed you and then shot myself because of the guilt. No. It's better that you weren't there."

"I wouldn't have believed it if I found you like that, Kate. I would never have believed that you killed yourself; I would have known Bracken was behind it. The boys too; no one who really knew you would have believed it. And we would have hunted Bracken down, made him pay," he wraps his arm around her shoulders and draws her closer.

"Then you would have been just like me two years ago, Castle. You would have been motivated by revenge; you would have thrown your life away to get revenge. I wouldn't want that for you. And it didn't happen, Castle. I'm still here. And Bracken is locked up for good."

They sit silently for a few moments, both grateful that the other is still alive. Suddenly Kate starts to pull away from him, turning to look at him with her brow furrowed in confusion.

"What wrong, Kate?" Castle's concern is evident on his face. He places a hand gently on her upper arm, trying to draw her out of her thoughts to talk with him.

"It has to be a coincidence. There's no way he could have known; it was over ten years ago. But… I was looking into her case at the time. Maybe he has had people following me ever since I was a rookie. Castle…" she rambles on, abruptly stopping to look in his eyes, hoping he can assuage her fear.

"Kate, you're going to have to give me more. What happened over ten years ago? What's a coincidence?" He wants to help her, to tell her that she is overanalyzing this, but he has no idea what she is currently thinking. The sparse information she has given him is no help.

"Dad… Dad started drinking a few days after the funeral. We didn't really talk much; he tried to drown the pain with alcohol, and I… went back to Stanford to follow in her footsteps, become a lawyer. When they just gave up and never found who killed her, I decided to become a cop instead. I had been working with Royce for about two years; we were on duty that night when I got this call about my father from the bartender where he usually drank. It wasn't entirely unusual; Dad had given them my phone number at some point, and whenever they were concerned that he wouldn't make it home, they'd call me so that I could get him home. But by the time I got to the bar that night, Dad had already left. He managed to get home, was sitting in a chair in the living room with a whiskey bottle in one hand and a… and a gun in the other."

"Kate, you don't have to tell me."

"No, it's fine, Castle. Just… nobody knows what happened that night except Dad and me. No one. And we haven't really talked about it."

"Hey, we've all made mistakes. I'm not going to see him any differently because of anything you say. Maybe he wasn't the best father for a few years after your mother died, but I can see how much he loves you now. And… if anything happened to you, I think I would turn to alcohol too."

She reaches out for his hands, taking both of his in hers and squeezing gently. "I told him to put the gun down, that we would find another way to deal with the pain. He said the alcohol wasn't helping to numb his pain anymore, that he just wanted to see her again. Then he started to bring the gun up to his head. I ran over and pried it away from him; the gun went off, and the bullet lodges itself in the ceiling. The whiskey bottle had crashed to the floor while we were fighting over the gun. He said that he just wanted to die, to see her again. He… he said that seeing me was torture for him because I looked exactly like her and that I should just leave him to die. I yelled right back at him, told him that Mom wasn't the only who died that night in January. I said that he wasn't the only one who lost her, that he was an awful father because he was too drunk to be there for me and support me through my grief over her death. I… Castle, I was so awful to him. I told him that Mom would be ashamed of him for drinking his life away. He picked the neck of the broken whiskey bottle up off the floor and came at me with it. I put my arm up to defend myself."

Kate pauses in her story, removing her hands from his to roll the sleeve of her shirt up to reveal a scar on her forearm, running along her ulna from a few inched below her elbow to the bony knot of her wrist. It had faded with time, and at first glance, one wouldn't notice it. Castle isn't sure how he had missed it before; he gently runs his finger along it, horrified that Jim Beckett had hurt his daughter. He couldn't imagine ever hurting Alexis.

"He was very drunk, Castle. I don't know how he wasn't unconscious. And he wasn't in his right state of mind. I've forgiven him for it. And he looked horrified after he realized what he had done. But I was still so angry at him; I said that I was done with him, that he could kill himself if he wanted to, that he was dead to me anyway. And then I just walked out. I fully expected to get a phone call the next day saying that he was dead. Weeks went by, and I never got that phone call or heard from him. He called me one night two months later; I almost didn't answer, thinking he just needed me to get him out of trouble. He said that he was going to AA meetings now, that he hadn't had a drink since that night. Dad apologized for hurting me, for not being there for me when she died because he was too caught up in his own grief. It took a while, but eventually I forgave him, and we've been able to fix our relationship."

"And you think Bracken somehow found out about that night?" Castle asks, finally looking up from the scar on her arm.

"I… I don't know. I was still looking into her case at the time; I didn't start therapy until about a year after all this happened. But I had nothing, Castle; I mean, there were things that didn't add up in the reports, but I really didn't have anything to go on until you found the connection with her colleagues. Montgomery knew I had been going through her files; maybe word got back to Bracken, and he had someone on me to make sure I didn't find any solid evidence."

"I'm sure it was just a coincidence, Kate. You're just overthinking it."

"You're right," she sighs.

"It's been a long couple of days, Kate. How about we go to bed?" He pulls her up off the couch and leads her through his office to their bedroom.

After putting on his own pajamas, Rick turns to watch her as she studies her mother's ring for a moment before putting the chain in her jewelry box. She pulls her own engagement ring out of the box and off of the chain he had given her to wear it on and puts it on her finger, staring down at it until she feels a hand on her back. "I thought I grabbed my ring when I went to the car repair shop to look for evidence against Vulcan Simmons; I wanted to bring a part of you with me, but I guess I didn't realize in the dark that I had the wrong one. And then we were forced to go on the run and I thought that I was never going to get your ring back."

"All we needed was each other, Kate. I could've gotten you another ring."

"You know… the only time throughout this whole case that I didn't have her ring on was the day I was shot. Maybe I made it through these past few days because I accidentally grabbed the wrong chain, Castle; maybe she was looking out for me."

"I think she's always looking out for you, Kate."

"Well, from now on, your ring is the only one I want to wear," she smiles up at him, hesitating before she continues. "She would've loved you, Castle. I wish you could've met her."

"I wish I could've met her too."

Kate lifts up on her toes to kiss him softly. "Thank you, Castle. I never could have done this without you. Not only because you stood beside me and helped me find new evidence against Bracken but because you kept me from getting buried in it; he would have killed me a long time ago if you hadn't been there to hold me back and make me see that there are more important things in life."

"Always."

**A/N: I don't think I have published anything in like three years. Let me know what you thought of it. I might do a post-finale fic too but there are so many of those already. I have a few other ideas so I might work on those this summer too.**


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